Blogging the Bible: Teraphim

A few months ago I posted about David’s escape from Saul. David’s wife Michal delayed the guards by dressing up her teraphim (household idol) to look like David and tucking it into David’s bed. Which showed that (1) these household idols were embarrassingly common (at least from a Biblical monotheism perspective) and (2) that they were pretty big, in fact about the size of a person.

In a Facebook comment on that post, Estelle let me in on an interesting tidbit. Because these teraphim were big, there’s been some academic speculation that they were mummified heads [or even bodies to take into account their size?]. This, as she aptly put, “could explain why the matter is treated as a bit of a skeleton in the closet”. However this also has some basis in classical rabbinic literature which I wanted to investigate.

Putting on my LMGTFY sleuthing, cap, I uncovered an interesting passage from Pirke de-Rabbi Eliezer (chap 36), a midrashic work from the (3rd?-9th) centuries:

What are the Teraphim? They slay a man, a firstborn, and he is red (in colour). All that a man requires (to know) is not written here. This is impossible since the men who dispute about the knowledge of making (the Teraphim) have increased. Everyone who follows that knowledge will ultimately go down to Gehinom. And they pinch off his head and salt it with salt and they write upon a golden plate the name of an unclean (spirit), and place it under his tongue, and they put it in the wall and they kindle lamps before it and bow down to it and it speaks unto them. Whence do we know that the Teraphim speak? Because it is said “for the Teraphim have spoken vanity” (Zech 10:2). [Source]

A few thoughts pop in my head as I read this. Mostly, there’s utter terror. Terror about the potential truth that these human sacrifices happened. Terror because of the sheer superstition expressed in the passage as the spirits are taken for granted. If any passage epitomises the light of reason as a faint candle in the dark, it’s this one. Terror because it speaks of a world filled with terror, from the horror of the supposed acts of these idolaters to the horrors of Gehinom that YHWH will make them suffer, to the spooky references to mystical knowledge contained in the passage.

But another reason for my revulsion is that I think the passage has a more plausible alternative. It’s that the rabbis just made this up as a standard xenophobic stereotype of Vicious Idolaters^TM. This follows a familiar pattern in the Bible and Talmud — accusations of “pagans” being guilty of the most ludicrous things under the sun. To get a quick taste, check out chapter 2 of tractate Avodah Zarah (idolatry). It discusses how Jews must not leave their animals alone with a gentile* because they are suspected of bestiality. Now, this probably does refer to some bestial orgies from Greek/Roman times but the historical reality is a far cry from the persistent stereotype presented here (“a gentile will always try to fuck your goat”).

The end result is the same. Either the idea of teraphim is horrible because they were real human bodies. Or it’s horrible because this was made up. In any case it really is understandable why this isn’t a topic of polite conversation in modern incarnations of Biblically-based religions.

*actually an idolatrous gentile but at that point in history the Talmud wasn’t big on the distinction